What Happens if You are Audited by the IRS?Atlanta CPA Advises on How to Handle IRS Audits

So you’ve just gone to your mailbox and much to your chagrin you have received an IRS notice. Your immediate reaction is one of fear and dread as your pulse races and you are not certain of what to do next. Although most certainly your initial reaction will be as described, there is a different path to resolving all audit issues to yours and the IRS’s satisfaction and to close your audit with no additional monies due.

"A satisfactory and successful audit process will include many factors and variables consisting of, first and foremost, calling your CPA. Your tax adviser is the absolute best one to address your audit and to better represent you and your business’s issues to the IRS using both the law and knowledge of your business to your best advantage."
— Duluth CPA, John Dillard CPA: Serving Gwinnett for Decades

The first step to address after a return is selected for audit, aside from calling your CPA, is to review the return in detail. Try to evaluate, from an independent perspective, your return, carefully evaluating what an IRS agent might be seeking most to review. After you have done this initial step you should then evaluate your documentation to see if you might need to accumulate any additional information to collaborate and support your return. During this process you should not discover anything new as all of these issues should have been adequately addressed before your return was prepared, signed, and forwarded to the IRS. However this process is critical to ensure that there are no holes in your paperwork, which might later cause you difficulty.

Most often it is advantageous for the CPA alone to meet with the IRS so as to remove any emotional issues, which might otherwise surface and dampen the ability to successfully and quickly resolve the process. Frequently when taxpayers strive to handle their own audit by themselves they fail to sense and adequately address the issues the IRS request; thereby causing themselves unnecessary hardships and economic loss. A CPA, who is familiar with you, your business and tax law is far more apt to successfully close an audit with no changes. Often during the audit process, yours as well as your CPA’s, expertise, will, and judgment will be challenged causing you to want to negotiate just to make the issue go way. However, this is not the best direction to choose as settling on any issue at all, when you are right, is not a prudent business decision especially in an audit environment. Of course this assumes that you can prove that your return has been truthfully prepared while using judicious and sound judgment and tax law accurately to reflect your true and just tax.

A successful audit experience depends on your ability to stay focused on the truth, the process, and to steadfastly stay on course. We have helped many through the successful completion of the audit and its ultimate disposition. Contact HIS CPA PC (A Christian CPA Firm) today.

"The American Entrepreneur is one who uses all of the tools in their toolbox to maximize their profits as much as they can and to pay as low of a tax bill as legally possible using every innovative tool at their disposal. Be sure you work with a CPA whose ambition matches or exceeds your own"
— Atlanta CPA, John Dillard CPA